American Swagger in a Dangerous Nuclear World

With the end of the Cold War in 1991 many dreamed that a new era of peace and harmony would emerge. Gone would be the nuclear shadow hovering over humankind. Eliminated would be bipolarity in which a geostrategically divided world was fractured by mutual assured destruction and messianic dreams of conquest and domination. Instead of realism--that hardboiled, imperial theory that became the raison d'etre of George Frost Kennan's containment policy and the aggressive fabric of NSC 68--a recrudescence of Wilsonian internationalism would emerge in a world that abandoned imperialism, balances of power, spheres of influence and proxy wars. Indeed, Francis Fukuyama in his dramatic work, The End of History and the Last Man (1991), envisioned in almost millennial terms a new world order in which conflict would be ancillary to an increasingly progressive, pacific interstate system.

As John Lewis Gaddis has noted, no scholar of international relations predicted the end of the Cold War. One should, therefore, avoid too strident criticism of those who demonstrate errancy in their post-Cold War suppositions as well. Yet those on the left, who construe American imperialism as endemic to its national character, were quite skeptical that the sole survivor of the Cold War would reject traditional power maximizing and avoid exploiting its erstwhile adversary's demise as an opportunity for hegemonic domination. Indeed, American elites with unseemly hauteur dismissed the wondrous Gorbachev initiatives of glasnost, perestroika and abstention from both conventional and nuclear arms races as"victory" over the Soviet Union and even hailed President Reagan's malevolent Star Wars proposal (Strategic Defense Initiative) as the coup de grace that frightened an impoverished rival into submission. Instead of the"end of history," U.S."history" has continued with a vengeance in the form of aggressive nationalism fueled by unilateralism and a messianic belief that American exceptionalism entitles it to renounce international treaties and regimes that attenuate its precious sovereignty. From rejecting the Kyoto Treaty on global warming to refusing to accept the war crimes jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, the United States plays by its own rules as it repeatedly flaunts international consensus.

Nowhere is this swaggering nationalism more evident than in its approach to nuclear nonproliferation and arms control. It was the United States that created atomic bombs, strategic bombers, thermonuclear weapons (H-bombs), MIRVed missiles, submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and cruise missiles. Since the inception of the atomic age, the United States has adopted a policy of first use of weapons of mass destruction. First use refers to a strategic doctrine that includes the possible initiation of nuclear weapons in an armed conflict. Indeed, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles enshrined this policy in his 1954 Council of Foreign Relations speech in New York when he proclaimed"massive retaliation" that threatened to unleash instantly a strategic nuclear attack even in response to a Soviet conventional attack. This New Look of the Eisenhower administration was somewhat altered under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's Flexible Response, an ambiguous doctrine that NATO adopted in 1967, which appeared to emphasize a mix of conventional, tactical (battlefield nukes) and strategic nuclear war fighting capabilities. Yet first use remains under the Bush administration as nuclear doctrine and as a component of its radical strategy of preemption as contained within its"National Security Strategy" that was released in September. With the subsequent publication of its"National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction" in December, there is an explicit threat to use nuclear weapons even in response to non-nuclear attacks against nations other than the United States. Furthermore, Congress has authorized research in the 2003 Defense Authorization Act to develop nuclear"bunker busters," so-called Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrators (RNEPs) that could burrow deeply underground. Perhaps this latest Strangelovian pursuit will create a new preemptive tool of choice: the ultimate nonproliferation dream weapon as it detonates stored underground nuclear, biological and chemical stockpiles!

In addition to first use, America's unilateralist aversion to arms control treaties is having a destabilizing effect in areas deemed dangerous to its national security interests. Although the likelihood of a nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia is remote, America's pursuit of a Pax Americana with unrivaled conventional and nuclear forces has exacerbated nuclear tensions throughout the Middle East and Northeast Asia. Even though the United States has not conducted a nuclear test since September 1992, it has not ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). The CTBT would prohibit all nuclear weapons-test explosions. By banning testing, it makes it more difficult for nations with nuclear ambitions--such as Iraq, Iran and North Korea--to acquire, much less deploy, atomic weapons. Although negotiations began in 1958 during the Eisenhower administration and continued episodically for decades, only three years after the CTBT was signed in 1996, the Senate, in an anti-Clinton partisan vote, rejected it. Craig Cerniello, then of the Arms Control Association, tersely described America's rejection as sending"shock waves throughout the world, drawing strong condemnation from Russia and China as well as American allies in Europe and Asia." Last summer, Mayor Itcho Ito of Nagasaki, during the fifty-seventh anniversary of the August 9, 1945 atomic incineration of his city, issued a peace declaration charging America's refusal to ratify the CTBT was a"unilateral action that runs counter to efforts to abolish nuclear weapons."

While the United States is gravely concerned about North Korea's intention to abrogate its 1985 ratification of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and exclude itself from International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards, America has paved the way toward nuclear anarchy with its unilateral abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972. Implemented during SALT I negotiations and hailed by many as the bedrock of strategic stability during the Cold War, ABM was based upon a very basic premise. If neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union developed a nationwide-missile defense system to interdict nuclear reentry vehicles, it would constrain the impulse to produce additional offensive nuclear forces that would overwhelm it.

While the Clinton administration began rhetorically to test the limits of the ABM treaty, for the first time in the atomic age the Bush administration on December 13, 2001 actually abrogated, with six months notice, a nuclear arms-control treaty. While some argue that ABM was outdated due to smaller,"rogue state" ballistic missile threats, the United States used a spurious invoking of Article XV (the supreme interests clause), to gut the treaty and begin deploying by 2004 ground-based interceptor missiles at Fort Greeley, Alaska. Recalling President Reagan's admonition that treaty compliance must not rely on promises but transparency through national technical means--"trust but verify"--the United States demonstrated that even when it's a state-party to verifiable treaties"of unlimited duration," it cannot be expected to honor them.

President Bush's principal war aim for a preemptive invasion of Iraq has rhetorically shifted from regime change-overthrowing a government of a sovereign state- to disarmament of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). The United States includes chemical and biological weapons as well as nuclear in its WMD counterproliferation agenda. One could include as a WMD the vicious United States-enforced sanctions regime against Iraq that has probably led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of infants and children. Yet WMD nonproliferation is not applied to Israel that has both fission (atomic) and possibly fusion (hydrogen) weapons with perhaps 100s of warheads. Middle East nonproliferation efforts should not be selectively applied against Islamic countries such as Iraq and Iran, which are nonnuclear states, but directed at nuclear powers such as Israel, who along with India and Pakistan, are the only non-parties to the NPT. Furthermore, our own refusal to accept WMD safeguards suggests an imperial exceptionalism that John Pike described as"demanding one set of rules for America, another for the rest of the world."

Consider the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) that entered into force in 1975. It prohibits the weaponization of biological agents (germs or diseases) and is the first multilateral treaty to ban an entire category of weapons. The treaty is virtually unenforceable due to sweeping changes in biotechnology that require a comprehensive verification inspection regime. The U.S. last July rejected any multilateral attempts at protocol negotiations that would make more difficult the weaponization of biological agents. Given the dynamic changes in biotechnology, American concerns that the protocol might lead to intellectual property violations, particularly among pharmaceutical companies, pales when compared to the threat of biological weapons proliferation. Indeed the U.S. pursues its own robust biodefense research program and yet repeatedly threatens to invade Iraq if there were a material breach of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441 that established an intrusive weapons inspection regime under the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC). For Iraq, the U.S. demands unfettered inspections to identify putative WMD stockpiles, but eschews international monitoring of its own facilities.

Bush described Iran, Iraq and North Korea as the"focus of evil" in his State of the Union address in January 2002. Clearly this accusatory rhetoric is hardly a disincentive for would be WMD-proliferators that fear America's wrath and proven ruthlessness in applying military force. Great powers cannot rule through force of arms alone but by moral example. If the United States is serious about pursuing nuclear and other forms of nonproliferation, it must adhere to international law, respect international treaties and join the international community as a participant and not as its imperial chieftain. As Bertrand Russell wrote:"For love of domination we must substitute equality; for love of victory we must substitute justice; for brutality we must substitute intelligence; for competition we must substitute cooperation. We must learn to think of the human race as one family."